The world is going to hell in a handbasket, latest instalment: this book is about "The Degradation of Language and Music, and Why We Should, Like Care". Apparently the American public used to have a huge appetite for English dressed to the nines, in the fine, rolling oratory of politicians and reams of memorised rhyming poetry. Now, clearly, it is not even necessary to be functionally literate to rule the country. Maybe the 1960s are to blame. Discuss.

The book is interesting and lively, though the part that is about music seems a bit tacked on, arguing that old standards are better crafted than "Oops I Did It Again" - an odd example, since that is such a fiercely well-machined pop moment. But the problem of the main language argument is one of inconsistency. It is not just that the author's style is littered with the slangy speech-style phrasings that he affects to deplore. More seriously, he wants to take two positions at once: he tells us that, as a scientific linguist, he can have no truck with ideas that some uses of language are more "correct" than others, and will make no aesthetic judgments about style; and yet here he is, praising old speeches, dissing modern poetry and pop lyrics, and making qualitative judgments about language's "degradation". I don't think he can have this cake and eat it too.

Liberal Eugenics, by Nicholas Agar (Blackwell, £12.99)

The mischievously provocative title for this essay, "In Defence of Human Enhancement", obscures the fact that the book is really quite a traditional exploration of the ethics surrounding modern reproductive technologies, stem-cell research and the possibility of genetically engineering children.

How can we think sensibly about what often seem like lurid sci-fi scenarios? Agar grandly proposes a newfangled "method of moral images", which turns out to be quite traditional argument by analogy, though he is careful to point out in what direction we are able to draw proper inferences when comparing cases. He spends a lot of time rebutting other arguments, often very effectively (in particular, the idea that our automatic "Yuck!" reaction to such ideas should somehow inform our moral decisions), adroitly shows how the choice of terminology in bioethics debates already encodes certain moral assumptions about the situation, and in general makes a very persuasive case for an informed, liberal though not laissez-faire approach to research.